Four Principles of Neurodiversity-Affirming Care - an excerpt from Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing
Guiding others through psychedelic healing is sacred work. This first chapter of Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing introduces four simple principles—collaboration, nonjudgment, curiosity, and flexibility—that help facilitators co-create safety with every client. When practiced with presence and care, these values expand what healing can look and feel like for all kinds of minds.
What happens when neuro-inclusion becomes the set and setting itself?
Scoring the Journey Part Five: Quick Modality Notes — Soundscapes Across Medicines
Different medicines create different relationships with sound. Each alters time, emotion, and body awareness in its own way. This guide outlines how music interacts with psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, and DMT—offering practical notes for facilitators working with neurodivergent clients. Drawing from research by Mendel Kaelen and others, it explores how tone, tempo, and texture can guide regulation, deepen surrender, and harmonize with each medicine’s rhythm.
Scoring the Journey Part Four: The Facilitator’s Ear — Embodied Listening and Ethical Presence
Facilitating with music begins with listening—to the self, the client, and the space between. This fourth part of Scoring the Journey explores the art of the facilitator’s ear: how to stay attuned, grounded, and ethically present so that music becomes a living dialogue rather than a fixed script.
Journey Music for Psychedelic Playlists: Helios — Veriditas (2018)
Helio’s Veriditas invites the listener into dreamlike, emotional terrain—music that feels both intimate and expansive. Its textures cradle the nervous system, supporting integration and reflection after the peak of a journey. This series explores albums that function as companions for inner work—soundtracks that hold, mirror, and move with the listener through altered states.
Scoring the Journey Part Three: Texture, Tone, and Technology — Tools for Ethical and Inclusive Soundscapes
Every playlist is built from texture—the grain of sound, the color of tone, the way vibration touches the body. Part Three of Scoring the Journey explores how timbre, layering, and technology influence safety and connection in psychedelic sessions, offering practical guidance for ethical and inclusive sound design.
Scoring the Journey Part Two: Mapping the Arc — Designing the Playlist by Journey Phase
Music in psychedelic healing follows an arc that echoes the body’s own rhythm—rising, peaking, and returning. This second part of Scoring the Journey explores how to design playlists that move with that natural contour, supporting neurodivergent participants through sound that breathes, steadies, and responds.
Scoring the Journey Part One: Building Playlists for Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing
Music in psychedelic therapy does more than fill silence—it shapes how emotions, memories, and meanings move through the session. For neurodivergent participants, sound can be an anchor or an overwhelm, a safety or an intensity. This first part of Scoring the Journey lays the groundwork for playlist design that listens to the nervous system as much as the music itself.
Contours of Sound: Mapping Stanislav Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs) to Journey Phases and Music Choices
This article examines how music can mirror the inner rhythm of a psychedelic journey through three complementary lenses: Stanislav Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs), Helen Bonny’s early music therapy frameworks, and contemporary research, including the Copenhagen Music Program. Together, they show how the emotional phases of a session—opening, struggle, breakthrough, and return—can be supported through carefully chosen soundscapes that invite safety, surrender, and integration.
When Music Sits in the Chair: The Hidden Therapist Guiding Psychedelic Healing
In psychedelic therapy, music often acts like a co-therapist—guiding the journey, stirring emotion, holding presence, and helping people return. This article explores how sound becomes a partner in healing, tracing the lineage from early psychedelic research to today’s adaptive soundscapes, with special attention to trauma-informed and neurodivergent care.